The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books (28 page)

Several Doubles

THE MUSIC STRUCK
up again and the largest curtain slowly rose while the curtain above the puppet orchestra was lowered, doubtless so as not to divert attention from the main attraction. The murmurs in the auditorium died away, to be replaced by a sound of lively birdsong.

The stage set represented a street of picturesquely weatherworn old houses above which a prettily painted sun was rising from the mist. The transition from semi-darkness to light, combined with the music, which resembled a suite by Gravid Greed, conveyed the awakening of a new day. It was, therefore, a morning scene. Some of the buildings were clearly bookshops or antiquarian bookshops with piles of books outside them. One moment, though, I actually knew this street! I had immediately been struck by its architectural peculiarities, all of which had some connection with antiquarian printed matter: a roof resembling an upturned open book, bricks in book form and so on. It was surely … yes, exactly: the street in which Ahmed ben Kibitzer had had his shop! It was Colophonius Regenschein Lane, site of some of the most popular antiquarian bookshops and one of the city’s classic attractions that had luckily survived the Great Conflagration unscathed. Well, well, so the play was set in Bookholm. The street had indeed been well conveyed – or, to put it somewhat more aptly: it had been perfectly reproduced down to the smallest detail. Every window frame, every roof tile, every doorknob seemed to have been accurately copied. An extraordinarily elaborate set for a puppet theatre.

Suddenly, a first-floor window in one of the houses was flung open and a puppet with dishevelled hair – it closely resembled an Uggly – looked out. To a few guffaws from the audience, it proceeded to sing in a hoarse voice:

‘Bookholm, city of dreaming books!

Bookholm, city of starving writers!

Bookholm, city of coloured lights!’

A second window burst open and a Demidwarf puppet leant out and bawled:

‘Bookholm, in thee alone the Orm

still burns in uncorrupted form
.

Bookholm, the one and only pure

and perfect source of lit’rature
!’

A third, fourth and fifth window opened. More puppets appeared and sang at the top of their voices:

‘Bookholm, where books still dream of days

when they were naught but swaying trees
,

Bookholm, where poets dream of times

when every line they think of rhymes!’

I squirmed in my armchair. What awful lyrics and why were they singing them? This was a
singeretta
, of all things! Also known, derogatively, as a
yodeletta
or
moron’s opera
, in other words, a piece of popular literature set to trivial music and adapted for the stage – certainly not one of my own favourite art forms, dear friends! Most singerettas were churned out by mass producers who brutalised the original literary material and mercilessly boiled it down to a handful of ill-rhymed little songs designed to be inflicted on crowds of easily impressed pleasure seekers who had strayed into a singeretta tourist trap – just as I had! Damn it! I should have known there was a snag to the evening! I would now be bawled at for two hours by singing puppets that mangled some unfortunate author’s work three times over. Great! That came of trusting the cultural taste of a Bookemistic Uggly. Someone who foretold the future from toad shit! Who drank her own urine by the light of the full moon! Ugglies did that sort of thing! And to think I’d allowed such an esoteric poison pill to spoil my evening in a city brimming with interesting cultural offerings! I mechanically chewed my thumbnail (as I always do when something annoys me – I simply can’t help it). Curses! I was stuck there for the first act, but I might be able to decamp during the interval – to feign some indisposition or something. Lying was my profession, after all.

More and more multifarious puppets were assembling onstage. Glove puppets were singing in windows and doorways, and appearing from behind handcarts and piles of books. They strutted around in the street as marionettes or toured the set in the form of full-length puppets – in other words, puppeteers themselves dressed up as puppets. Within a very short space of time the stage was teeming with grotesque figures that presented a picturesque spectrum very like the real hurly-burly prevailing in the streets of Bookholm. I saw down-at-heel poets with unsaleable manuscripts under their arms, ruthlessly jostling Hoggling agents, hunchbacked booksellers toting stacks of antiquarian tomes from shop to shop, marvelling tourists bumping into lamp-posts, hawkers with handcarts full of books, roaming book advertisements, scurrying
Live
Newspapers, and here and there a masked Biblionaut in full armour. There were even a chimneysweep dancing on a roof and rats singing at the entrance to a sewer. It was all very meticulously done, I had to admit, and I might almost have been mollified – had the lyrics not been so frightful. The puppets had launched into a reprise of the refrain:

‘Bookholm, where books still dream of days

when they were naught but swaying trees
,

Bookholm, where poets dream of times

when every line they think of rhymes!’

One moment! It hadn’t occurred to me before, but the words were mine! They were ill-abridged and garbled Yarnspinner!

‘Where books still dream of days when they were naught but swaying trees …’

Yes, that was my intellectual property, it came from … I gave a terrible start that derailed my train of thought. Why? Because of a monstrous development onstage: I myself had just rounded the corner of a building!

This subject – an encounter with one’s own doppelgänger – had already been tackled several times in Zamonian literature, dear friends, and it was usually a metaphor for the onset of insanity. I only hope, therefore, that the following remark will not be construed as metaphorical, for what came round the corner onstage really did look
exactly
like the person I sometimes regarded, not without a certain satisfaction, in the mirror: my own likeness! If you encounter your own likeness
elsewhere
than in a mirror, you’re surely entitled to doubt your sanity a little, aren’t you? For one long, terrible moment, the two monkeys from the trapeze act seemed to be tearing at my brain and ripping it asunder like their fellow simian. I had an urge to jump up, run off, sink into my chair, awaken from this nightmare, cry out, dissolve into thin air, and laugh and weep at the same time. Insanity must truly feel like that! In the event, I merely leant even further over
the
parapet, staring helplessly at the apparition onstage until my trance was dispelled by a dig in the ribs from Inazia.

‘Surprised?’ she croaked in a triumphant voice. ‘I almost gave the game away – I really had to bite my tongue! What do you think of the Yarnspinner puppet, eh? It’s fantastic – go on, admit it! You jumped as if you’d seen a ghost!’ She cackled heartlessly.

I had broken out in an ice-cold sweat. It was a puppet, of course, and the words were mine. They were putting on something from my oeuvre. I
hadn’t
lost my mind! My brain
wasn’t
being torn in half. I
wouldn’t
have to spend the rest of my life in a padded cell. That much was reassuring. I slumped back in my chair, fighting for breath.

‘
The City of Dreaming Books
!’ Inazia whispered, wagging a bony finger at me. ‘Your book about Bookholm –
that’s
what they’re doing tonight!’

The music was now reminiscent of Sweng Ohrgeiger’s spirited
Atlantis Symphony
, which had first lent artistic expression to the hectic hurly-burly prevailing in modern Zamonian cities. The orchestra at least imitated its unusual concept, which was to reproduce the sounds and motifs of urban bustle by musical means. Rhythmically plucked violins, clattering castanets and blaring brass underpinned the impression made by the shoving and jostling puppets that hustled gawping Yarnspinner (I had still to get used to the idea that
I
was the figure onstage) along the busy streets of Bookholm. Buildings sprouted from the floor of the stage or glided down from above as the Yarnspinner puppet tottered through this hive of activity, vainly trying to take in as much of it as possible. Inazia grinned at me, and I strove to relax by sitting back and concentrating on developments onstage.

Some Bookhunters came striding across the stage – life-size marionettes operated from above by thick wires and accompanied by terrifying blasts on the trombophone and thunderous drumbeats. Their get-up – from martial armour to fearsome helmets and murderous weapons – was extremely realistic. This was truly how they had looked in the old days, as I shuddered to remember. The marionettes’ robotic movements were well suited to those heartless fighting machines.

‘Now comes the olfactory solo,’ the Uggly announced casually. ‘Better blow your nose first!’ She produced a handkerchief and did so herself. I noticed that several members of the audience were doing like wise. The whole auditorium suddenly rang with trumpeting and sniffing.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘I don’t have a cold.’

‘Can’t you smell anything?’ Inazia retorted.

It was true! It occurred to me only now that I’d smelt quite a lot of things since the play began. The scent of freshly baked bread, for example. Coffee being brewed. Crispy breakfast bacon. I’d assumed that these odours emanated from the theatre café and just happened to suit the morning atmosphere onstage. Was that what the Uggly had meant? Before I could ask, applause rang out. One of the smaller curtains rose while the scene on the main stage was still in full swing. It presented a view of a remarkable set almost the size of a single-storeyed house.

Was
it a set at all? Or a machine? It could also have been part of the theatre’s heating system – I didn’t have a clue, dear friends. If it was a machine, its builder had a sense of humour, because I’d never seen such a peculiar apparatus. It consisted largely of glass and metal, flasks and pipes, test tubes and balloons, spirals and pistons, cylinders, retorts and condensers, funnels and countless receptacles interconnected in a complicated manner with tubes and hoses. Some of the containers were filled with liquids of the most diverse colours, others with steam and fumes in different stages of aggregation: sometimes light and thin like mist, sometimes black and thick as ink, sometimes pink and flickering, sometimes yellow and luminous. The liquids, gases and vapours were being pumped through the maze of tubes in so many different ways that this alone would have been a sight worth seeing. But the really sensational sight on this secondary stage did not reside within the crazy contraption’s system of tubes. Oh no, it was situated just in front of it: a Murkholmer was standing at a complicated console and operating the machine.

Yes, dear friends, your ears did not deceive you: a Murkholmer! You remember, don’t you?
¹
It was as impossible for a genuine Murkholmer to mount the stage of a Bookholm theatre as for a Bookhunter to be seen in the city’s streets, for both were illegal. The Murkholmers had played such an inglorious part in the machinations of Pfistomel Smyke
²
that they were all banished from Bookholm after the Great Conflagration. This fellow on the stage could not be real.

‘Is that … a puppet?’ I asked Inazia uncertainly.

‘No,’ she hissed, ‘he’s the real thing.’

‘A live Murkholmer? Here? I thought they were banned.’

‘It really is a long time since your last visit,’ the Uggly whispered. ‘There have been a few changes, my friend. Bookholm is a tolerant city. We can’t afford to outlaw a whole species just because a few of its members overstepped the mark.’

‘Overstepped the mark?’ I expostulated. ‘The Murkholmers helped Pfistomel to brainwash half the population of this city! You experienced that yourself – personally! They—’

‘Calm down!’ the Uggly said soothingly. ‘That fellow on the stage wasn’t one of them – he wasn’t even born then! Relax! One has to be able to forget sometimes.’